Great Success Guest Blog from Pat Rigsby

My friend Pat Rigsby sent this out and I asked if I could reprint it:

I don’t know if you follow professional basketball – I only do a little – but the
big news is LeBron James now entering free agency and whether he will
return to the Cleveland Cavs or go to a bigger market like Chicago or New
York.

Supposedly a big key to his decision is how it will impact the growth of his
global brand as he wants to be the next Michael Jordan – or bigger.

Maybe I’m missing something – but wasn’t the key to Michael Jordan
becoming a global icon the fact that he was the best basketball player
on the planet and won 6 championships?

Seems like LeBron is getting the cart ahead of the horse and worried
about steps 4,5 and 6 before he’s completed 1, 2 and 3.

Maybe I’m wrong, but in sports it’s hard to be considered an all-time great
without winning a championship and he’s yet to lead his team to even one.

It happens in business all the time too. Trainers are ready to write ebooks,
create DVDs and call themselves ‘experts’ without actually doing the
legwork to justify that title.

As far as I’m concerned there is no problem with trying to climb to the
top as quickly as humanly possible – as long as it’s based on substance.

You gotta have the steak – not just the sizzle.

Dedicated to your success –

Pat

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This entry was posted on May 31, 2010 at 5:04 pm and is filed under Guest Authors, Random Thoughts . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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I think you are right. First step is to explore what you might do that is different. Start writing for sites like strengthcoach.com or elitefts. See if people read your stuff. See if there is a market.

As a modestly young (30-years-old) strength coach with a fair amount of experience (coupled with plenty of learning under my belt I sometimes feel a bit of an itch to at least continue creating a continuing-education style information product. But by the same token, I also realize that I am still a relative tyro compared to folks like you and a number of others in this field and still haven;t necessarily paid enough dues or been at it long enough to consider this route.

My burning question is this………

Since much of what I know comes from having listened to, and either made direct use of or modestly adapted, information provided by experts like you, I inevitably feel like most of what I could come up with in terms of a product would essentially be recycled or re-framed information without any noteworthy or truly landmark twists or innovations. This has made me hesitant to even consider creating products, because while there rarely is anything truly new under the training sun, and while only a select few coaches ever become genuine innovators (shaping the cutting edge as opposed to following closely or much further behind it), I’d feel far more comfortable directing folks to products created by the likes of you, Gray Cook, Eric Cressey, Christian Thibaudeau (for the more hypertrophy oriented stuff), and many others (who I am leaving out for the sake of brevity) who have already created standard-setting material in various sub-categories.

While I have zero doubt that my experience and learning up until this point have provided me with the tools to creat a very solid product, I’d feel somewhat ridiculous putting one together when a large part of me would want to just point people towards someone else’s product for a given topic. Additionally, it makes no sense to try and force myself into swinging for the fences with such an endeavor, since that only ups the pressure involved without increasing the likelihood of creating a true home-run of a product.

Truly seminal works and essential contributions to these allied fields usually develop organically (as opposed to being forced) and spring forth from the fertile minds of people who would qualify as true Hall-of-Famers (or future 1st- Ballot HOFer’s) and possess a blend of innate aptitude for this type of stuff, a work ethic nonpareil, and drive to continually keep on learning. ………………….in contrast to how I feel about what I would create, namely that I am a solid “second-tier” guy who also works hard and continues to learn, but I feel that I lack that intangible something extra. And in a world of an over-saturated info product market, where even many solid products simply come across as mostly or entirely redundant, I’d feel rather guilty simply submitting something that ended up as just another entrant in the pile, even if it would trend towards the higher-quality end of the spectrum.

As much as I would love to create a respectable product capable of helping educate some folks while providing me some passive income to supplement my in-the-trenches coaching efforts, it just doesn’t feel right to mostly recycle things or simply give my take on many areas that have been extensively covered, when I can simply tell someone to buy your products, for example, and know they’d be getting a dynamite deal/phenomenal bargain and learning opportunity.

Do you have any thoughts on getting over that hump or finding the missing ingredient that might help drive me into a realm where I feel that products I’d create would be genuinely novel resources that contributed in a new and useful way and didn’t simply rehash the same stuff ad nauseum?

Heck, even my own buying habits would seem to show that while many products cover similar ranges of topics, I only buy from a very select set of authors on a regular basis. So while there may be quite a few very good products mixed in with the junk out there, I tend to only purchase what I consider to be the truly revolutionary products from those genuine innovators like you, since it ensures always getting the largest bang for my investment buck and aids in separating the wheat from the chaff without a Herculean effort.

Agreed….kids today ask my good friend, a recruiter for the biggest telephone company in Canada if they will be promoted to upper management by next year. These kids….are just out of college. Those in upper management have put in 20 yrs+.

There is something about this “Y” generation that tells me they were absent during any type of struggle or hardship. They grew up in the 90’s where the money was flowing and there parents were doing well. They never learned the value of work and work for years and years and years.

They often have no idea that talent can only get you in the door and that it takes years and years of consistent excellence to earn the right of passage that the like of MJ has earned, plus others in other industries. LeBron is just another example of the “Y” or the “me” generation that thinks they should get a medal for showing up. Too bad us Gen X-ers are still calling the shots. Its time to get some work done folks!